


there are rays on the weather

by seoryoungs (orphan_account)



Category: HINAPIA (Band), PRISTIN (Band)
Genre: Gen, No Dialogue, i mean there is ONE line of dialogue at the END but like whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:28:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23151733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/seoryoungs
Summary: soon these tears will have dried / all loneliness have died(or, bada sees her members in a new light.)
Relationships: Kim Bada (HINAPIA) & Everyone
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25
Collections: OBSCURE SORROWS FIC FEST





	there are rays on the weather

**Author's Note:**

> the mcfly effect: the phenomenon of observing your parents interact with people they grew up with, which reboots their personalities into youth mode, reverting to a time before the last save point, when they were still dreamers and rascals cooling their heels in the wilderness, waiting terrified and eager to meet you for the first time

The older girls invite Bada to dinner with their friends. She says, sure, I’ll go along.

She maybe should have seen this coming, but somehow Bada didn’t realize that Minkyung, Kyungwon, Yaebin, and Eunwoo’s  _ friends _ were the other members of Pristin.

So, here’s the thing. Yes, Bada knows about Pristin. She knows about Produce 101 and the many years spent at Pledis and the successful debut and the rookie award and the mismanagement and the radio silence and the disbandment. She knows about the holdover awkwardness between Zhou Jieqiong and the rest of them, knows that Siyeon and Kyla went back to school and Nayoung became a model and Yewon and Sungyeon didn’t really do much other than a couple appearances with Bumzu. But what Bada had never really considered was the way that her members might be different around the rest of Pristin than they are with her. 

Here is how Bada knows Eunwoo: Eunwoo is her older sister. Eunwoo is the Elsa to Bada’s Anna. Eunwoo was one of the first, with Minkyung, to take initiative and make sure Bada felt welcomed and included in the group.

Here is how Bada knows Kyungwon: Kyungwon is loud and brash, and scared Bada a little, almost, the first time she met her. Kyungwon is tall and fierce and refuses to apologize. 

Here is how Bada knows Minkyung: Minkyung is in charge. Minkyung sits at the head of the table, and she scolds the others when they act out, and she keeps her head held high and never  _ never  _ breaks. 

Here is how Bada knows Yaebin: Yaebin calls Bada her baby. She is adorable and small and stands on her tiptoes even when the cameras aren’t around because her height is a besmirchment of her own personal pride. She’s quick to laugh and slow to anger. 

Here is how Bada knows her members: they welcome her. They are professional, and sometimes emotional (more than sometimes, if it’s Yaebin or Eunwoo). They are experienced and they show her the way and they never, ever, argue. 

This is why dinner with the rest of Pristin jars her. 

She’s shy around the six other girls (because, yes, Kyla was in Korea, that’s why they were having dinner together). She doesn’t  _ know _ them. It’s startlingly like she’d just joined the group again, curled in a corner of the dorm with phone in hand. This is not a situation Bada enjoys, she thinks, sitting between Yaebin and Sungyeon attempting to concentrate on her tangsuyuk. 

People-watching is not one of Bada’s usual hobbies. It’s just that in the past months she’s been in so many situations where the only way to learn what to do is to figure it out from what the people around her are doing. So she starts paying attention, and what she sees is not what she expected. 

Eunwoo is… cute. Eunwoo has so much fucking aegyo it makes Bada cringe. She talks in lispy, tensed-dieut aegyo to Minkyung, Kyungwon, and Lim Nayoung, asking for bites of their food; she clings to Yaebin and to Zhou Jieqiong in a way that reminds Bada of a small child on their first day of school, desperate to not be separated from their mother. And Eunwoo pays Bada no attention, which is rather new. 

See, Eunwoo usually pays enough attention to Bada that Bada feels smothered. But now, no, Eunwoo is absolutely not concerned with Bada (or with any of the younger girls, for that matter - she isn’t absorbed in Siyeon or Kyla, as Bada might have expected). Rather, Eunwoo’s focus has not left Yaebin and Jieqiong since the latter had come late into the restaurant, ten-cm heels pleasantly clicking an allegro against the blue tile floor. 

Yaebin, too, is different. To Bada, Yaebin is the one with aegyo, but now… Yaebin seems more like an adult. She’s sexier, almost - not sexy to Bada, but sexy in the way that she carries herself. This Yaebin is more like the Yaebin on their MV sets than the Yaebin who shares a dorm with Bada. She, too, orbits Jieqiong like the Chinese girl is the center of a three-idol universe. It’s funny because Bada had never considered Yaebin and Eunwoo as being close before. But then again sometimes the closest friendships don’t need to prove themselves through proximity. 

Kyungwon, despite being the member who hides the least, has always been the hardest for Bada to read. In a way, Kyungwon at this dinner party is the most like the Kyungwon Bada knows - loving and touchy, loud, a meme, showing everyone pictures of her dog and taking selfies for the fancafe every five minutes. It is simultaneously comforting and condescending when Siyeon tells Bada about “monthly YuYu”, because of course Bada knows about monthly YuYu, but it’s nice to know that Kyungwon doesn’t change. 

It’s odd seeing girls who are all older than her on the receiving end of her unnies’ cheek-squishing. Siyeon and Sungyeon seem annoyed by it, Kyla soaks it all up like a cat showing its tummy to the sunlight, and Yewon… just seems happy. Bada can’t say she blames any of them. 

And then there’s Minkyung. It is weird to see Minkyung not be the leader. She seems freer, less stressed than Bada has ever seen her - which of course isn’t to say much, because as much as Minkyung tries to hide it everyone in the dorm can tell that she’s always stressed all the time - and Bada can’t quite put a finger on  _ exactly _ what but there’s just something different about her. A lightness to her shoulders, something less constrained about her smile. This, Bada realizes, is what Minkyung is like when she allows herself to have feelings. She holds back a laugh. 

One of the funny things about Hinapia is how they rarely, if ever, fight. Bada chalks it up to the other four’s thankfulness to have each other, the ups and downs they’ve been through together, and her own unwillingness to challenge them on anything. 

This dinner turns into a dumpster fire rather quickly. 

Nayoung, cool and calm as the cameras always made her out to be, presides at the head of the table and does her best to keep things civil but that doesn’t stop Siyeon and Jieqiong from getting into a passive aggressive argument about Jieqiong’s career not five minutes after their food arrives. That doesn’t stop Kyungwon asking Yewon again and again about why hasn’t she performed since back in the day, even Sungyeon performed at Bumzu’s concert, and Yewon getting visibly more and more uncomfortable until finally Bada herself intervenes and asks Kyungwon to pass her the pickled radish not because she wants some but because it’s the only way she knows how to break the tension. That doesn’t stop Minkyung from crying when Kyla mentions applying to colleges on the US’ east coast. 

Nayoung seems flustered but at the same time at peace, as though these chaotic occurrences are business as usual. And maybe that  _ is _ how they’d always been. Bada, the outsider, sure wouldn’t know. 

This is not to say that Bada is ignored. At the beginning of dinner Eunwoo true to form introduces Bada as her little sister and Yaebin’s baby, and she and Kyla maintain a stable, gossipy conversation about WJSN members and a couple of the Weki Meki girls. Nayoung makes an attempt at conversation with Bada, but the seven-year age difference lends itself to awkwardness, as does Nayoung’s ice-queen modeling career and Bada’s newness to the entertainment industry. Nayoung does share a few good tips for managing period pain during variety shows, though, tips that for whatever reason Bada’s own members hadn’t seen fit to pass on. 

But, yes, for the most part Bada plays second fiddle to the Pristin members and for the most part Bada is fine with that. She knows enough about this whole situation to know it would be a bitch move to complain about not enough attention being paid to her. 

She is, though, happy to leave. 

The car ride back to their dorm is equally as strange as the dinner itself. It is a silent car ride, not in and of itself unusual, but much more solemn than their usual, tired brand of silent drives. Minkyung, behind the wheel, breathes shakily. Bada can see it in her shoulders. 

Kyungwon stares straight ahead. Something about her seems almost shell-shocked. It’s not just her eyes, but her entire demeanor, that’s unfocused. 

Yaebin had gotten into it with Siyeon shortly before leaving the restaurant and she still has nervous energy to her. Bada remembers how before their very first broadcast Yaebin had started bouncing her leg up and down and didn’t or couldn’t stop. Yaebin is doing that again, now. Her left canines trap her bottom lip between them in a tell that Bada knows signals anger - not hot anger, but frustration. 

Eunwoo’s just drained. Both the Eunwoo Bada knows and the Eunwoo she met tonight are high-energy, but this Eunwoo is Eunwoo running on low power mode. If Eunwoo were a phone, her screen would be dim; if she were a car, she’d be running on fumes. 

Is this what they were like, Bada wonders, before signing to a new label? Is this the way they looked when Pledis had broken the news? Is this how they were during those months spent in limbo, before Han Kyungjin, bless his soul, had found them? 

Is this what they were like before  _ her _ ? 

“Hey, unnies,” she says from the middle of the backseat, her voice ringing through the silence and causing three out of four of them to startle. “Thanks for bringing me along.” 

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, so i started this in january and let it sit for a month and a half and then i got forcibly yeeted out of college thanks to coronavirus and finished this in a night lmao
> 
> i do not have a handle on kyungwon's personality, i never have, i've stanned since wee woo era and still have no idea what she's like, i am so sorry kyungwon
> 
> i am on [twitter](https://twitter.com/vivasunn) and [tumblr](https://deep-hearts-core.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> so many thanks to the mods of sorrowsfest for setting this up - i had so much fun with this and with my yet-to-be-released other fic, and really appreciate all the work put into this!


End file.
